That rough-and-ready method of ejectment, which found such favour in the south and west, never recommended itself to the northern understanding. The thing has been done, of course: the roofs have been stripped off; the windows taken out; the doors torn from their hinges; in extreme cases the very walls undermined, and the house razed with the ground; but patient as the northern temperament is, I doubt if a landlord could enjoy much ease of mind supposing he saw a man like Amos Scott sitting by his naked hearth—with the heavens for his rooftree, and the wind and the rain blowing and beating on his head.
Upon the whole, supposing imagination presented the picture of such a reality, the landlord’s dreams—let right be on his side or wrong—would be of coffins and of a violent exit into that other world where all the vexed questions of this will—as we fondly hope—be settled to the satisfaction of the poor, the oppressed, the brokenhearted.
Curious to say, although Mr. Brady was a bully he was not also a coward; which seems as inconsistent a statement as to say a negro is not black. Nevertheless, it is the truth. The man was not destitute of physical courage. He had writhed mentally under the taunts hurled at him by the Rileys; but he would not have feared a stand-up fight with the son—a hand to hand struggle, with liberty given to each to kill if he were able.
Nevertheless, Mr. Brady had gone almost as far with the Scotts as he cared to do. He had dug their potatoes and sold them, cut the grass and saved it, reaped the corn and carried it, sown the land with seed, that was again hastening to fruition; but beyond this he hesitated to go. The law must do the rest, he said; but spite of the fact of justice being on his side, he found the law liked the task of turning Amos Scott out on the world rather less than he did.
When a bailiff came to take possession of the household goods, gathered together carefully, anxiously, in the first part of the Scott’s married life, he was received by husband and wife, one armed with a blunderbuss and the other with a pike, a relic of ninety-eight.
“Honest man,” said Amos, miscalling him in an access of civility, “honest man, if ye want to sit down to rest ye’re kindly welcome; if ye want bite or sup, we can give ye share of what we have ourselves, water and a meal bannock; but if ye lay a finger on anything in this house and claim for that devil Brady I’ll shoot ye dead. I’ve made up my mind to slay the first who meddles with the inside of that half-door, so if anything happens your blood will be upon your own head, not upon mine.”
The result of which speech was that the man neither stopped nor took breath till he found himself in Kingslough again. There was a steady light in Scott’s eye, and a suggestiveness about the way in which he kept his finger on the trigger, ill-calculated to make visiting at the Castle Farm pleasant to a person of the bailiff’s profession.
Afterwards Amos declared, “He only meant to fear the man;” but if this were so his sport was sufficiently like earnest to carry conviction with it.
Matters had arrived at this pass, in a word: people whispered Scott was dangerous and that Mr. Brady went armed. Further, popular sympathy was with Scott, and the very ballad singers had long slips of badly printed doggrel reciting the doings of Mr. Daniel Brady from his youth upwards, and enlarging upon the fact not only of his having “decoyed a lovely maiden to a land beyond the seas,” but of his trying subsequently
“To cajole a gallant gentleman,